Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA - Dream On.......

[Peter Lemkin]

http://lawanddisorder.org/
Law and Disorder January 20, 2014 Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download





Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA-Frances Goldin, Michael and Debby Smith
Our own co-host Michael Smith, his wife Debby and Frances Goldin have assembled and edited an anthology of powerful essays titled Imagine Living In A Socialist USA. Prominent thinkers, activists and artists have given their perspective of what the United States would look like through the lens of a socialist society. This new work is an important contribution to what we hope will be a broader movement. It includes an indictment of capitalism, an alternative U.S.A. and how to get there.
Frances Goldin:

• It was my brainchild because I wanted to accomplish 3 things before I joined by ancestors. One is everyone who lived in Cooper Square who had been fighting Robert Moses and saving their old tenements since 1959 its been a tremendous long struggle.
  
• This is the only community land trust in the Northeast. The only one.
  
• The next one is that I was really distressed at the direction our country was moving. Here I am 89 years old and all of a sudden North Carolina says that we're going back to the old days where you had to bring in your right arm and read the Constitution without missing a word in order to vote. That plus spying on every American and continuing the wars.
  
• It was just breaking my heart. I was very distressed that everybody thought that socialism was a dirty word, it was an undemocratic terrible way of life and they just didn't have a clue as to what it really meant.
  
• I thought it would be a great idea to pull together some of the greatest minds in the country and let them talk about health, education, welfare, homosexuality, every subject that effects American's lives and explain how it would be different under socialism if it were democratically done, which is the only way it should be done.
  
• Within one year, 31 leading brains in the United States for no charge, they did it free, wrote their essays on each one of these subjects. The book is in my hand, its finished and its beautiful and it makes me so happy. That's my second accomplishment.
  
• The third one is to see one of the leading intellectuals in the world free, forever free. Mumia Abu-Jamal.
  
• I couldn't do it alone, it was a great plan and so I leaned on to dear friends, Debby and Michael Smith.
  
• I had to force Harper Collins into this, they really didn't want to do it.
  
• We were very lucky to hire an incredibly good editor, whose livelihood was editing for magazines and newspapers. If a sentence was too long, he cut it into 2 or 3 sentences.
  
• Right now, the word socialism, people think of dictatorship, they think terrible things, they think undemocratic.
  
• This is a simple instruction about how it would effect us with regard to health, education, housing, welfare, all of those subjects which make it so difficult for all of us to live.
  
• It can't be a dirty word, it happens to be the most democratic way of governing possible.
  
• Get the workers to run the company. It's happening in Spain, with dozens of corporations that have become worker owned.
  
• It's going to be the workers dividing the profits among themselves.
  
• It will only happen when the workers are angry enough and informed enough to know that they can run the show.
  
• Every penny of the royalties will go to free Mumia Abu-Jamal
  
• We are not earning one dime from this book. It was a labor of love. It was a labor of activism.
  
• It was a labor to change the world and make it a better place.
  

Guest Frances Goldin is the President & Principal of Frances Goldin Literary Agency. Frances has worked in publishing for 63 years, as an agent and as editor-in-chief of a children's publishing company; she founded the Frances Goldin Literary Agency and sold her first book in 1977. Authored by Black anthropologist Betty Lou Valentine and titled Hustling and Other Hard Work, the book continued to receive royalties for 32 years. One of the agency's strengths is that many of its books continue to earn royalties long after publication. Reflecting Goldin's radical politics, the Agency concentrates on literary fiction and serious, controversial, progressive non-fiction.

Attorney Michael Smith:

• I don't think its a dirty word, because people see what's going on under capitalism and they don't like it. The economic situation in this country ain't gonna change, its only going to get worse.
  
• Frances is quite an influential literary agent in this country.
  
• What's your definition of socialism? I said a democratic economy and political system, both where people from the bottom up control how we make a living, and how we live.
  
• We're having a book launch on January 27. It's at 126 Crosby Street in SOHO at the book store called Housing Works.
  
• In order to achieve the kind of socialism we're talking about and that's socialism from the bottom up you need a broad democratic movement of people.
  
• All the left wing parties, all the movement groups, we gotta get together around a common program.
  
• One of the chapters that I really like, and this isn't to flatter you Michael Ratner, but you wrote a chapter on what I would do if I was US Attorney General.
  
• Paul LeBlanc writes his chapter about the 3rd American revolution. Diane Feeley writes about that in her chapter. She's an auto worker retired from Detroit.
  
• Michael Zweig, the great sociologist, we reprint his speech from Occupy Wall Street where he talks about the 1 percent, the ruling class.
  
• He says actually its 1/10 of 1 percent. Those are the people who are the top of the economy and different organizations in this country. He said, you gotta be very careful, because these people will kill ya.
  
• In the second part of the book, we emphasize use your imagination. How do we organize the economy democratically?
  
• How do you organize a corporation democratically? Rick Wolff wrote that chapter.
  
• There are 31 chapters in the book. The last chapter suggests itself. How do we do it?
  
• We're not against leadership, we're against undemocratic leadership but you need people who've had some experience and who can draw the lessons of the past.
  

Guest Attorney Michael Smith is co-host of Law and Disorder, and a New York City attorney and author. His most recent book, written with Michael Ratner , is Who Killed Che? How The CIA Got Away With Murder. He is on the boards of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Brecht Forum. He was educated at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s, where he learned social history from the great teacher Harvey Goldberg. He has testified on Palestinian rights before committees of the US Congress and the United Nations.
Guest Debby Smith is a long time socialist since going to college in Boston during the radical sixties. Debby worked full-time for the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Kent State Legal Defense Fund and in the feminist, union and socialist movements. She is also the wife of Michael Smith and participates in the anti-capitalist and pro-democracy movements that are growing rapidly in the United States and worldwide.

[Tracy Riddle]

http://www.blacklistednews.com/19_Number...8/Y/M.html

Have you noticed that people are becoming angrier? You can see it everywhere in our homes, in our schools, in our workplaces, in our television shows, in our movies, and certainly in Washington. In fact, many have said that there is an "epidemic" of anger in America today.

And it is undeniably true. As you will see below, a whole host of surveys and opinion polls show that America has become a seething cauldron of anger and frustration unlike anything that we have ever seen before. As a nation, we are more divided than we have been in decades, and economic conditions continue to deteriorate. People are working harder than ever and Americans get less vacation days than anyone else in the world, but median household income keeps going down every year. Americans are dissatisfied with their relationships, their jobs, their communities and their political leaders. There is this growing sense that our country is steamrolling toward disaster, and yet there is very little agreement on what the solutions to our problems are. Instead, blaming others for our problems has become a new American pastime. The very fabric of our society is coming apart at the seams and the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted is beginning to disappear. What is America going to look like if we continue to go even farther down this road?

The following statistics come from various surveys and opinion polls that have been conducted recently. Without a doubt, these numbers show that Americans are angrier and more frustrated than ever…
#1 65 percent of Americans are dissatisfied "with the U.S. system of government and its effectiveness". That is the highest level of dissatisfaction that Gallup has ever recorded.
#2 66 percent of Americans are dissatisfied "with the size and power of federal government".
#3 70 percent of Americans do not have confidence that the government will "make progress on the important problems and issues facing the country in 2014."

#4 Only 8 percent of Americans believe that Congress is doing a "good" or "excellent" job.
#5 Only 4 percent of Americans believe that it would "change Congress for the worse" if every member was voted out during the next election.
#6 60 percent of Americans report feeling "angry or irritable". Two years ago that number was at 50 percent.
#7 53 percent of Americans believe that the Obama administration is "not competent in running the government".
#8 An all-time low 31 percent of Americans identify themselves as Democrats.
#9 An all-time low 25 percent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans.
#10 An all-time high 42 percent of Americans identify themselves as Independents.
#11 Barack Obama's daily job approval numbers have dipped down into the high thirties several times lately.
#12 Only 38 percent of Americans approve of the way that Obama is handling the economy.
#13 60 percent of Americans believe that the "economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy".
#14 70 percent of Americans do not "feel engaged or inspired at their jobs".
#15 Two-thirds of U.S. teens "admit to having anger attacks involving the destruction of property, threats of violence, or engaging in violence".

#16 36 percent of Americans admit that they have yelled at customer service agents during the past year.
#17 73 percent of Americans believe that Obama's efforts to "reform" the NSA "won't make much difference in protecting people's privacy".
#18 77 percent of Americans believe that the state of the economy is either "not so good" or "poor".
#19 65 percent of Americans are either "somewhat dissatisfied" or "very dissatisfied" with the direction of the country.
Are you starting to get the picture?
We have never seen anything like this in the United States during the post-World War II era. People are fundamentally unhappy, and that has tremendous implications for the future of our society.
So what is causing all of this anger and frustration?
Well, of course the economic struggles that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing on a daily basis play a huge role. The following is an excerpt from a recent local Fox News report…

Some are describing this as "America's anger epidemic." And there are a few reasons: uncertainty in the job market and the economy, working long hours on average about one month more now than they did in the 1970s and with less vacation.

So if it seems like Americans are angrier these days it's because we are.

And it is easy to understand why people are becoming increasingly frustrated with the incompetence and rampant corruption in Washington D.C.…

Grim findings have been coming thick and fast. Most Americans no longer see President Barack Obama as honest. Half think that he "knowingly lied" to pass his Obamacare health law. Fewer than one in five trust the government in Washington to do what is right all or most of the time. Confidence in Congress has fallen to record lows: in America, as in Italy and Greece, just one in ten voters expresses trust or confidence in the national parliament. Frankly straining credulity, a mammoth, 107-country poll by Transparency International, a corruption monitor, this summer found Americans more likely than Italians to say that they feel that the police, business and the media are all "corrupt or extremely corrupt".

Americans are also turning on one another. Since 1972 the Chicago-based General Social Survey (GSS) has been asking whether most people can be trusted, or whether "you can't be too careful" in daily life. Four decades ago Americans were evenly split. Now almost two-thirds say others cannot be trusted, a record high.

In addition, there are certainly other reasons why people are so angry these days as well…

The "Knockout Game" grows more popular. Athletes throw tantrums that would embarrass most 3-year-olds. Race relations simmer at a constant near-boil, while our leaders engage in enough posturing and name-calling to look more like a modern version of "West Side Story" than the servant-citizens who should inspire peace and mutual respect.

So what do you believe?
Why do you think that Americans are so angry and so frustrated these days?
Is there anything we can do about it?

And how bad will the anger and frustration in this country get when the economy completely collapses?

[David Guyatt]

Similar to the Weimar republic then, just before Mr. Stunty Moustache Crap Forelock took power.

[Peter Lemkin]

Capitalism: The Real EnemyPaul Street

I threw families onto the street in Iraq only to come home and find families thrown onto the street in this country in this tragic and unnecessary foreclosure crisis. We need to wake up and realize that our real enemies are not in some distant land, and not people whose names we don't know and cultures we don't understand. The enemy is people we know very well and people we can identify. The enemy is a system that wages war when it's profitable. The enemy is the CEOs who lay us off from our jobs when it's profitable. It's the insurance companies who deny us health care when it's profitable. It's the banks who take away our homes when it's profitable. Our enemies are not 5,000 miles away: they are right here at home.

Mike Prysner, testimony to the Iraq Veterans Against the War "Winter Soldier" Hearings, March 13, 2008

Mike Borosky's Story
Where to begin in evoking the horrors of capitalism in the contemporary United States? We could start with the experience of Mike Borosky, a former factory worker from Pennsylvania. In January 2011, while the media focused on the democratic upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt, Borosky learned that the Coleman pop-up camper trailer factory in the town of Somerset, where he had been employed for more than thirty years, was shutting its doors. He got the news just as his wife was being wheeled into an operating room for spinal surgery."I was numb," Borosky, then fifty-three, remembers. "My wife had just gone in for surgery, and I didn't even have a job. I wasn't even thinking that I didn't have health insurance."It probably didn't take long for that second terrible thought to register. The United States is the only country among modern industrialized "democracies" that doesn't provide universal health care for its people. With its archaic system of employment-based health insurance, it is a nation in which workers fear not merely the loss of their jobs but consequently losing health insurance coverage for themselves and their families as well.Soon Borosky learned that FTCA Inc., which had taken over the Coleman plant years before, had failed to pay the health insurance premiums for its workers. That left him stuck with more than $63,000 in medical bills. FTCA was owned by Blackstreet Capital, a private-equity firm that managed hundreds of millions of dollars in investment capital. Blackstreet claimed there were no funds left to pay the Coleman plant's 150 employees any of the benefits owed them under their union contract. FTCA abruptly closed the factory without issuing the 60-day notice required under federal law. It cancelled workers' health insurance and refused to pay severance and accrued vacation time or to make good on the contributions it owed to their 401(k) retirement accounts.Borosky's story was told in the winter 2012 issue of the United Steelworkers' (AFL-CIO) magazine. That issue also reported that Whirlpool, the world's leading appliance manufacturing corporation, would soon close its large refrigerator plant in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and send much of its production to Ramos Arizpe, Mexico. Whirlpool blamed sluggish demand for appliancesthe same reason it gave in 2010 for closing a refrigerator factory in Evansville, Indiana, and transferring that plant's work to Mexico. That move cost the United States a thousand jobs, a standard chapter in the familiar story of capitalists' longstanding "globalization" campaign. The company had nothing to say about its thirst to boost profits by exploiting cheap labor and weaker environmental regulations abroad."Profits Booming, Why Not Jobs?"
A New York Times article published around the same time that Mike Borosky got knocked numb by Blackstreet Capital was titled "Profits Are Booming, Why Not Jobs?" Times business correspondent Michael Powell reported that corporate "earnings" had exploded "even as fifteen million Americans remain mired in unemployment, a number without precedent since the Great Depression" and while the citizenry experienced "record levels of foreclosures and indebtedness." At the current sluggish level of job growth, Powell noted, the US economy would require seven and a half years just to replace the jobs lost at the beginning of the Great Recession of 20082009. Another five million jobs would be needed just for employment to keep up with population growth.Meanwhile, American businesses reported that profits in the third quarter of 2010 had risen at an annual rate of $1.66 trillion, "the steepest annual surge since officials began tracking such matters 60 years ago. It was the seventh consecutive quarter in which corporate profits climbed," Powell noted.Powell found numerous reasons for the profits-jobs disconnect. US-based corporations now made a remarkable portion of their profits overseas. Thanks to lax American tax laws, "these companies return fewer of those profits to American shores than in the past."Some big American firms were showing higher profits simply because their competition had collapsed. After the financial crash of 2008, for example, Wall Street giants Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase no longer had to compete with Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch. Many jobs disappeared with the departure of the defeated firms.In the wake of the crash, many companies sat on capital and stored up liquidity like never before. Firms who no longer believed they could borrow quickly decided to keep a lot more cash on hand as a precaution. The falling interest rates produced by the recession gave corporations an incentive to simply "exploit the spread" between the low cost of borrowing and the higher rates of return on federal Treasury bonds they purchased with cheap loans. This let them make money without selling much or hiring new workers.Meanwhile, a large reserve army of unemployed workers was a profits boon to corporate America. Desmond Lachman, a former managing director at Salomon Smith Barney and now a "scholar" at the American Enterprise Institute, an influential right-wing think tank, spoke about this candidly. "Corporations," Lachman told Powell, "are taking huge advantage of the slack in the labor marketthey are in a very strong position and workers are in a very weak position. They are using that bargaining power to cut benefits and wages, and to shorten hours"and thereby to increase profits."A Harsh Environment Is a Good Thing"
"American" capital was also continuing to shift jobs to lower-wage countries. In the era of global capitalism, US capital has gravitated to places like Foxconn's Longhua factory campus in Shenzhen, China, where wages are low enough for the company to "make products like the [Apple] iPhone at seemingly impossible prices," as Bloomberg Businessweek wrote.The entrance to the Longhua campus, the magazine said, "looks like a border crossing, with seven tollbooth-like lanes and uniformed guards." It has 300,000 workers, who also manufacture Sony PlayStations and Dell computers.Foxconn employs more than 920,000 workers across 20 mainland Chinese factories. It manufactures products for leading "American" multinational corporations, including IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard. The workers, mostly 18-to-25-year-olds from rural areas, live in dormitories and are paid a mere $176 per month. The conditions are so alienating that 11 workers committed suicide in early 2010, most of them by leaping from the high-rise dormitories. The company subsequently strung more than 30 million square feet of yellow nets around its buildings and set up a 24-hour counseling center with 100 workers on staff.The "drab and utilitarian" production complex, as Businessweek described it, includes "huge LED screens that flash public-service announcements and cartoons" and a bookstore that sells the Chinese-language translation of the Harvard Business Review. The bookstore prominently displays biographies of Foxconn CEO Terry Gou, the "Henry Ford of China" and the richest man in Taiwan; Forbes estimates his personal fortune at $5.9 billion. One of the Gou biographies collects his many pithy aphorisms, including the following Dickensian maxims: "Work itself is a type of joy," "Hungry people have especially clear minds," and "A harsh environment is a good thing."The arduous nature of working-class life in Shenzhen and similar manufacturing zones around the worldBangladesh, the Philippines, the maquiladoras along the US-Mexican borderis a leading reason why US workers now make only a small portion of many of the consumer goods sold in the United States. A harsh environment for developing-country workers is a good (i.e., profitable) thing for globally mobile "American" capital."Ready to Lead"
The American "homeland" has also become a much harsher environment for its working-class citizens. Mike Borosky's ordeal is one of millions unfolding at the hands of capital here. Since the monumental financial collapse in the fall of 2008 that shook the world and plunged the United States into an epic recession, the signs of destitution have intensified: The 2010 Census revealed that a record-setting one in fifteen Americans now live in "deep poverty," on an income of less than $11,157 for a family of fourless than half the amount the federal government defines as "poverty." By 2010, the total number of Americans living in official poverty reached a historic high of 46.2 million. Over 15 percent of the nation's population (more than one in seven Americans) lived below the federal poverty line, on incomes of less than $11,139 for a single person or $22,314 for a family of four, a standard that many consider grossly inadequate. By 2011, one in six Americans (fifty million, a population twice the size of Texas) had no health insurance, and 14.5 percent of American households were defined as "food insecure"having difficulties putting enough food on the table. A Census report commissioned by the New York Times in the fall of 2011 showed that one in three Americans lived either in official poverty or in "near poverty," at less than 150 percent of the poverty level. As usual, the crisis fell hardest on people of color: Four of every ten black people of working age were unemployed at some point during 2008 and 2009. In thirty-five of America's biggest cities, during the first half of 2010, the official joblessness rate among black people ranged from 30 to 35 percenta measure equal to the worst days of the Great Depression. The real combined unemployment rate for black and Latino workers (including workers who were involuntarily underemployed) in 2010 was 25 percent. The black poverty rate rose to 26 percent, double that of white poverty. The difference between the median wealth of white and black households rose to nearly 15 to 1. The median black household's net worth was only 7 percent of the median white household's. By 2010, more than half the homes bought by black Americans in 2006 had been foreclosed on. In 2010, an astonishing half of all US children and 90 percent of black US children had depended on food stamps at some point during their lives.A De Facto Dictatorship in the Heartland of "The Beacon to the World of the Way Life Should Be"
The Whirlpool Corporation's sprawling and plush global headquarters is located on the edge of Benton Harbor, Michigan. Its predominantly white managers and staff steer clear of the city proper, whose 11,000 people are 89 percent black. Site of a riot sparked by police brutality in the summer of 2003 (the National Guard was called in), Benton Harbor has a poverty rate of more than 50 percent, a child poverty rate above 60 percent, a deep poverty rate of 26 percent, and a per capita income of around $10,000.It is plagued by the standard ills that accompany poverty in the militantly business-ruled nation that Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas) once called "the beacon to the world of the way life should be": mass unemployment, failing and underfunded schools, crime, drugs, broken government, and endemic despair. Over the last thirty-five years, the once-thriving manufacturing town has been stripped of industrial jobs (Whirlpool and other local manufacturers left for cheaper labor elsewhere); of retail stores (Sears and J.C. Penney left town years ago); of environmental health (the departing manufacturers left behind hundreds of acres of polluted fields and wetlands, including a Superfund site contaminated by radioactive paint); of a favorite local beach (recently appropriated by Whirlpool and upscale developers to create a fancy lakeside golf resort); and now even of its last remnants of formal democracy.In April 2011, Benton Harbor's local government was handed over to an "emergency fiscal manager"a de facto dictator appointed to run the city under a chilling law passed by Michigan's militantly pro-corporate governor and state legislature. Governor Rick Snyder issued an order removing all powers from the local city council. As the Reverend Jesse Jackson said soon afterward, "No money can be spent, no taxes raised or lowered, no bonds issued, no regulations changed without his approval."This can accurately be described as "fiscal martial law." In the name of balancing the city's budget, the new czar can sell public assets, revoke labor contracts, dismiss pension boards, and take over pension funds.Jamie Dimon's "Earnings": $57,000 a Day
While lower- and working-class people sufferparticularly people of colora tiny minority is accruing obscene fortunes and sits atop huge piles of capital. There are more than 3.1 million millionaires in the United States: the proverbial "1 percent."Above them are the not quite 57,000 people (0.05 percent of the US population) who have been identified by the global wealth-intelligence firm Wealth X as "ultra-high net worth" individuals. The firm defines these outrageously rich people as anyone with at least $30 million in wealth, "including shares in companies, real estate, cash, art collections, private planes, and other investable assets."At the very top, "the beacon to the world of the way life should be" has over 400 billionaires. At the pinnacle, according to Forbes magazine's list in early 2012, are three men: Bill Gates (net worth $61 billion), Warren Buffett ($44 billion), and Lawrence Ellison ($36 billion). Their combined wealth exceeded the total recession-induced budget shortfalls of every US state government in 2011.The ultra-rich club includes J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, whose net worth is $200 million. According to the Wall Street Journal in April 2011:

$57,031. That's about what the average US archaeologist made last year. It's also what Jamie Dimon made every day of last year$20.8 million total, according to the firm's proxy filing this week. Anyone who has doubts about the resiliency of Wall Street banks and brokerages should ponder that figure for a while. The J.P. Morgan board also spent about $421,500 to sell Dimon's Chicago home. And they brought back the big cash bonus, doling out $30.2 million in greenbacks to Dimon and his top six lieutenants.

Dimon and his fellow ultra-rich are touchstones of what is by far the industrialized world's most unequal society. By the eve of the crash, in 2007, the richest 1 percent of Americans owned more than a third of the nation's wealth and more than half of its financial wealth. The top tenth owned two-thirds, and the top fifth owned 85 percent, leaving the bottom four-fifths to fight it out for just one-sixth of the nation's wealth. The 120 million people in the bottom two-fifths owned 0.3 percentessentially nothing.Six members of the Walton family, the five children and one daughter-in-law of Walmart founders Sam and James "Bud" Walton, had a total net worth of $69.7 billion in 2011, labor economist Sylvia Allegretto estimates. This was equal to the total wealth of the entire bottom 30 percent, she found, citing the triennial Survey of Consumer Finances. It was a remarkable finding, given that Walmart pays wages so low that nearly a third of its workforce receives some kind of public assistance. The company was then cutting health-care coverage for part-time workers and raising premiums for many full-time staff. And Walmart is perhaps more responsible than any other company for transferring American manufacturing to China, as it is constantly demanding lower prices from its suppliers.Such were the terrible and economically unsustainable consequences of what former United Auto Workers president Douglas Fraser in 1978 called the "one-sided class war" that corporate and financial America has waged on working-class incomes since the 1970s. Between 1983 and 2001, the top 1 percent of Americans gobbled up 28 percent of the rise in American income, 33 percent of the gain in national wealth, and 52 percent of the growth in financial net worth. In 2007, the one percent "earned" 23 percent of the nation's income, more than twice the share they had in 1986. Between the 1970s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, median pay for executives at the nation's largest companies more than quadrupled (after adjusting for inflation). In the same period, pay for a typical non-supervisory worker dropped more than 10 percent.The nation's wealth inequality deepened after the crash, thanks to the devastation wreaked on housing values. Housing is the largest part of middle- and working-class families' net worth; in 2007, the bottom 60 percent of Americans had 65 percent of their net worth tied up in their homes. In contrast, the top 1 percent held just 10 percent of their wealth in personal real estate. The housing crisis has therefore inflated the share of total wealth held by the super-rich and deflated the share held by the bottom 60 percent.A Blunt Lesson About Power
Amid the rising misery of the 2008 crash, the "people's government" in Washington, DC, scuttled about, scheming to bail out and protect the corporate and financial institutions that had crashed the economy. This was a completely bipartisan affair. The epic transfer of trillions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street started under President George W. Bush and proceeded to record-setting levels under Barack Obama. It was not accompanied by any comparable aid for the millions of Americans who were running out of ammunition in the war on destitution. It was not matched by any remotely adequate government investment in urgently needed public works and jobs programs, housing assistance, or cash assistance for families.The liberal commentator William Greider put it well in March 2009, when the Treasury Department announced that the Wall Street mega-firm AIG would be receiving an additional $30 billion in federal assistance on top of the $60 billion it had already gotten, even after news emerged that AIG had paid out $165 million in bonuses to its top managers. "People everywhere [have] learned a blunt lesson about power, who has it and who doesn't," Greider wrote in the Washington Post: "They [have] watched Washington run to rescue the very financial interests that caused the catastrophe. They [have] learned that government has plenty of money to spend when the right people want it."Indeed, the Obama administration has provided a tutorial on who really rules America. The "change" and "hope" presidency brilliantly demonstrated the reach of what Edward S. Herman and David Peterson call "the unelected dictatorship of money," which vetoes any official who might seek "to change the foreign or domestic priorities of the imperial US regime."Along with continuing the monumental bailout of the ultra-rich financial overlords, the Obama administration refused to nationalize or even significantly regulate the parasitic financial institutions that had paralyzed the economy. It passed a health-insurance bill that only the big insurance and drug companies could love. It cut a bailout deal with the automobile industry that rewarded capital flight and raided union pension funds. It undermined desperately needed global efforts to reduce carbon emissions at conferences in Copenhagen in 2009 and Durban in 2011. It refused to develop serious public-works programs (green or otherwise). It green-lighted offshore drilling and other environmentally disastrous practices. It extended Bush's tax cuts for the rich. It froze federal wages and salaries. It made a debt-ceiling deal in 2011 that would slash social programs instead of raising taxes on the rich. It disregarded its promises to labor and repeatedly betrayed the constituencies in its progressive base.Meanwhile, it kept the promises it made to its Wall Street and corporate sponsors, who had set new campaign finance records in backing Obama in 2008.In the summer of 2011, at the height of the "debt-ceiling crisis" manufactured by the elite, one issue of the New York Times suggested the limits of "change." A front-page story reported on the House Republicans' false claim that increasing taxes on the rich would undermine corporate investment in the jobs that American workers desperately needed. Another was titled "Even Marked Up, Luxury Goods Fly Off Shelves." While overall consumer spending continued to languish amid a "human recession" that lingered despite the "statistical recovery" announced earlier that year, the wealthy few were resuming their ways of conspicuous luxury consumption:

Nordstrom has a waiting list for a Chanel sequined tweed coat with a $9,010 price tag. Neiman Marcus has sold out in almost every size of Christian Louboutin "Bianca" platform pumps, at $775 a pair. Mercedes-Benz said it sold more cars last month in the United States than it had in any July in five years. . . .

Even with the economy in a funk and many Americans pulling back on spending, the rich are again buying designer clothing, luxury cars and about anything that catches their fancy. Luxury goods stores, which fared much worse than other retailers in the recession, are more than recoveringthey are zooming. Many high-end businesses are even able to mark up, rather than discount, items to attract customers who equate quality with price. . . .

The luxury category has posted 10 consecutive months of sales increases compared with the year earlier, even as overall consumer spending on categories like furniture and electronics has been tepid [emphasis added].

Dewey's Dark Cloud
The terrible signs of savage inequality and plutocracy have emerged despite the sentiments of the majority of Americans. Poll after poll shows that most Americans believe that job creation should be a bigger government priority than deficit reduction, that social protections should be expanded and not contracted, that the rich don't pay enough in taxes, that economic inequality and poverty are the nation's leading moral issues, that big business and the wealthy exercise too much influence over elections and policy, that government dollars should be significantly transferred from military to social programs, that Social Security and Medicare benefits should be protected and expanded, and that public-sector workers deserve collective-bargaining rights. But in 2011, when numerous Republican-controlled state governments tried to obliterate public workers' rights, there was no meaningful opposition from the Obama White House.None of this majority progressive opinion ever seems to matter very much in the United States. Here, as the philosopher John Dewey wrote nearly a century ago, "politics is the shadow cast on society by big business."The nation's gaping "democratic deficit" is a much greater problem than its much-bemoaned fiscal deficit. As Noam Chomsky noted in 2011, "Since the 1970s, [Dewey's] shadow has become a dark cloud enveloping society and the political system. Corporate power, by now largely financial capital, has reached the point that both political organizations, which now barely resemble traditional parties, are far to the right of the population on the major issues under debate.""We the people" are not sovereign in the failed state that is the twenty-first-century United States. Capital rules, over and against the will of the citizenry and the common good.Capitalism vs. Democracy
Those who find this difficult to believe because they have been taught to conflate capitalism with popular governance (as two sides of the same coin"the single sustainable model for national success") should look at Webster's New Twentieth-Century Dictionary (unabridged and second edition, 1979). There,cap'i-tal-ism, n. is defined as "the economic system in which all or most of the means of production and distribution as land, factories, railroads, etc., are privately owned and operated for profit, originally under fully competitive conditions; it has been generally characterized by a tendency toward concentration of wealth, and, in its later phases, by the growth of great corporations, increased government control, etc."This definition does not mention any of the things routinely identified with capitalism in the dominant US political and intellectual discoursedemocracy, freedom, trade, job creation, growth, and/or a "free market" that is characterized by widespread competition and/or little or no government interference. Capitalism is about profit for the owners of capitalperiod. They attain this through any number of means. The most damaging include: seizing others' land and materials slavery (the leading source of capital accumulation in the United States before it was outlawed in 186365) firing workers or replacing them with technology undermining the value and power of labor by "de-skilling" workers by reducing the amount of knowledge and experience they need to do their jobs outsourcing work to sections of the world economy with the lowest wages and the worst working conditions hiring and exploiting unprotected migrant workers slashing wages and benefits, or cheating workers out of them purely speculative investment forming monopolies and using them to raise prices dismantling competing firms, sectors, and industries deadly pollution and perversion of the natural environment appropriating public assets military contracting and war production working to shape political and intellectual culture and policy in their favor by funding political campaigns, hiring lobbyists, buying and controlling the media, manipulating public relations and propaganda, investing in the educational system, offering lucrative employment and other economic opportunities to policy makers and their families, holding key policy-making positions, and threatening to withdraw investment from places that don't submit to capital's rules while promising to invest in places that do.When capitalism is understood for what it is really and only aboutinvestor profitthere is nothing paradoxical about its failure to serve working people and the common good, much less the cause of democracy, in the United States or anywhere else. If corporate profits are high, the system is working for its architects and intended beneficiaries: capitalists. Its great corporations (now granted the legal protection of artificial personhood) are working precisely as they are supposed to under US law. This holds, as the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in Dodge v. Ford Motor Company in 1919, that "managers have a legal duty to put shareholders' interests above all others and no legal authority to serve any other interests."One does not have to be a Marxist or other variety of radical to acknowledge the basic differences and fundamental conflicts between capitalism and democracy. "Democracy and capitalism have very different beliefs about the proper distribution of power," the liberal economist Lester Thurow noted in the mid-1990s. "One [democracy] believes in a completely equal distribution of political power, one man, one vote,' while the other [capitalism] believes that it is the duty of the economically fit to drive the unfit out of business and into extinction. . . . To put it in its starkest form, capitalism is perfectly compatible with slavery. Democracy is not [emphasis added]."Chicago Tribune economics correspondent R. C. Longworth, also no radical, wrote in 1999 that the "struggle of democracy and capitalism" was at the heart of the debate over the global economy. In theory, he observed, "they are meant to go together, indeed to be inseparable. But democracy's priorities are equality before the law, the right of each citizen to govern the decisions that govern his or her life, the creation of a civilization based on fairness and equity. Capitalism's priorities are inequality of return, profit for the suppliers of capital . . . the bottom line [emphasis added]."Capitalism vs. Survival
A beleaguered and destroyed natural environment is the ultimate "harsh environment" produced by the profit system. The enemy that radical veteran activist Mike Prysner spoke of is also a system that destroys a sustainable, life-supporting environment whenever it's profitable to do so The enemy is the CEOs who hire lobbyists and public relations firms to deny and discredit science's findings about global warming and related environmental disasters in the making.According to research published in June 2012 by the science journal Nature, humanity is now facing imminent threat of extinction caused by its reckless exploitation of the natural environment. Our planet's biosphere is ever more rapidly approaching a tipping point: all of its ecosystems are undergoing an irreversible change that is rendering them inhospitable to human life."The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including . . . fisheries, agriculture, forest products, and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations," wrote leading author Anthony Barnosky, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California-Berkeley."My colleagues who study climate-induced changes through the Earth's history are more than pretty worried," co-researcher Arne Mooers, a professor of biodiversity at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, said in a statement. "In fact, some are terrified."If this environmental catastrophe isn't averted, Noam Chomsky said in a widely read speech to Occupy Boston in 2011, then "in a generation or two, everything else we're talking about won't matter." Capitalism lies at the heart of this ecological crisis. It values private profit over the common good, a thing's selling price over the value of its social use. It insists on private management, to whom the short-term bottom line is more important than the long-term fate of the species. It has a deep investment in the carbon-addicted way of life and death. It depends on constant growth and accumulation. It is attached to a divided world of competing nations and corporate empires incapable of common action for the global good.This is all incompatible with the profound changes required for humans and other life to survive the ecological crisis, rightly described by the radical philosopher John Sanbonmatsu as "the number one issue of our or any time [emphasis added]." Solving the crisis requires moving beyond the profit system.The Real Issue
Months after its encampments were torn downoften with brute force and most often by Democratic city governmentsthe Occupy movement still deserves major credit for changing the nation's political discourse. By emphasizing economic inequality and the unmatched power of the wealthy few to destroy democracy, society, and the Earth's ecology, it called out the names and addresses of the true masters: corporate-financial capital and Wall Street.If the Occupy movement and the movements that will carry on its spirit are to achieve real change on the scale required, they will have to confront the real enemy beneath and beyond "the 1 percent": the endlessly rapacious and ruthless socioeconomic system called capitalism.The capitalist order is the taproot of economic collapse, social breakdown, imminent environmental collapse, and authoritarian state failure in both the United States and the world. John Dewey rightly prophesized that this would continue, that US politics would remain "the shadow cast on society by business" as long as power resides in "business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents, and other means of publicity and propaganda."We have been living with the dire consequences of that tyranny for far too long. The conclusion is unavoidable: reforms, while they'd improve people's lives, will not suffice. Fundamental social change leading us beyond the profit system is essential if we are going to bring meaningful democracy to the United States. As the great democratic socialist Martin Luther King Jr. noted in a posthumously published essay titled "A Testament of Hope," the real issue to be faced is "the radical reconstruction of society itself."

[Peter Lemkin]

"Imagine Living in a Socialist USA": New Book Envisions Greater Democracy, World Without Capitalism

We end today's show looking at a new book titled "Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA." The book features essays by many prominent people, including Michael Moore, Angela Davis, Frances Fox Piven, Martín Espada, Rick Wolff and Democracy Now! co-host Juan González. The book comes out at a time when polls show Americans aged 18 to 29 have a more favorable reaction to the word "socialism" than "capitalism." The book is co-edited by the legendary book agent Frances Goldin, who has worked in the publishing world for more than six decades and will turn 90 years old in June. In 1951, at age 27, Goldin ran for New York State Senate on an American Labor Party slate headed by W.E.B. Du Bois. Goldin joins us now along with one of her co-editors, Michael Smith. He is a New York City attorney and a board member of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We end today's show looking at a new book titled Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA. It is co-edited by the legendary book agent Frances Goldin, who has worked in the publishing world for over six decades. Goldin turns 90 years old in May. She has said she has long had two goals left in life. One was to help free Mumia Abu-Jamal. The other was to publish a book about socialism in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: While Frances Goldin is still working to help free Mumia Abu-Jamal, her book on socialism was recently published. The book features essays by Michael Moore and Angela Davis, Frances Fox Piven, Martín Espada, Rick Wolff and our own Juan González. Frances Goldin joins us now, along with one of her co-editors, Michael Smith. He's a New York City attorney, author, and board member of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! So, Frances, tell us about why this has been an aspiration of yours to publish a book on socialism.
FRANCES GOLDIN: Well, I have been pretty depressed about the route our country is taking. It was shocking to me, after all the years of struggle and the gains that we've made, with regard to people voting, with regard to women having rights to abortion if they wanted it, all these hard-won gains being destroyed by the right, which isthey've decided that Democrats are not going to vote for them, so they'vethe way they're fixing it is to prevent people from voting. And there are many, many states that have laws passed that make it very hard there. They're stopping early voting. They're not allowing weekend voting. You have to bring in your right arm and take a quart of blood in order to cast a ballot. This is outrageous. That was one major reason, because we were running to hell in a handbasket. We weren't moving toward democracy; we were moving toward fascism. And that scared the hell out of me.
And the other reason was the ignorance of the general population as to what socialism really is. They didn't have a clue. And, of course, the media made sure they didn't have a clue. And I thought it was important in plain Englishnot in academese, but in plain Englishand for that, I credit our editor, Steve Wishnia, who did a wonderful job of making all of these theories into plain English, so that students, high school students, college students, and the masses of people who read their daily news could understand what we were trying to say about what socialism would be like, not in Russia, not in China, but in our United States. And I think the book succeeds in making clear how people would benefit, not be harmed, by socialism, because it has to be the most democratic form of government ever conceived.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Michael, how did Frances get you involved in this project? And also, to the surprise of many, the book is being published by HarperCollins, the Rupert Murdoch publishing company. How did that happen?
MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: The demon of the publishing world, as Alex Cockburn said. I knew Frances from Mumia defense work. Incidentally, the profits, if we make any from this book, are all going to Mumia's defense. Frances said, "I don't want a small, left-wing publisher. I want a major publisher." So she went to Oxford, and the guy said, "This book isn't balanced enough." So Frances said, "What the hell do you mean, 'balanced enough'? What do you want? A half a chapter on fascism?" But we lost there.
So then she went to Harper. And Frances has dealings with Harper through her agency. They turned her down. They said, "Well, we don't thinkour marketing people said that we can't sell enough books." So Frances says, "Let me remind you of something. I gave you Barbara Kingsolver. I gave you the book that sold second most, next to the Bible, in the world, Goodnight Moon. And I want this book published." So they called her back, and they said, "Frances, your passion has won out. Come up and see us."
So Frances and I and my wife, Debby Smith, who is the other co-editor, go up to their office on 53rd Street near Fifth Avenue. We meet with the executive vice president, a British guy. He's got one of those offices that looks like a living room, you know, with a couch and a chair and tables, a desk, everything. We walk in, and on the couch are two pillows. One's got a drawing of Queen Elizabeth II, and the other pillow has got a drawing of Karl Marx. So I said, "Mr. Burnham, this is an auspicious beginning." And he laughed. He's a congenial British guy. And he said, "What's your definition of socialism?" I said, "Well, it's not only political democracy, but it's economic democracy, where people take over and run the resources that affect their lives." And he said, "Will you take $10,000 as an advance?" And I said, "Will you plow it into promoting the book?" And he said, "We'll try." And I said, "Well, we've got a deal." So that's how we got, of all places, Harper's.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, on that issue, that question, "What is socialism?" Michael, for people whoin this country, the media rarely talks about it, to say the leastif it's ever mentioned, in a disparaging way.
MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: You know, Paul Le Blancthe book is set up in three sections. The first is an indictment of capitalism. That's easy. All you've got to do is tune into Democracy Now! every morning, and you realize what's going on. The second part, and the meat of the bookand we can talk about this in a secondbut it's got 20 chapters on everything you can imagine, every institution in this society, and how it would be different if we didn't have capitalism. And the last part of the book are six essays on how we get from where we are to where we want to be, how to make that transformation. And your essay, Juan, I have to sayit's a book full of wisdom, not the least of which is your essay on immigrants and the role that they'll play in that transformation.
But in any case, in a word, Paul Le Blanc writeshe's a historian, and he wrote one of the chapters on how to transform it. He says, socialism involves people taking control of their own lives, shaping their own futures, and together controlling the resources that make such freedom possible. ... Socialism will come to nothing if it is not a movement of the great majority in the interests of the great majority. ... People can only become truly free through their own efforts." That's a good Passover message, by the way. That's our definition of socialism. It's true democracy.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Frances, one of theto me, the most striking essaysthere were many in the bookwas the one by Mumia and Angela Davis on the prison-industrial complex. First of all, how did you manage to put together that collaboration between the two of them, one incarcerated and one traveling around the world, and also the importance of that particular essay?
FRANCES GOLDIN: Well, it was easy, because Angela Davis was a supporter of Mumia's freedom. So they were not unknown to each other. Also, she wrote a book about the end of prisons. So it was a natural for us. It was not easy, because he's in prison, she's free. They had to collaborate by stuff going back and forth. It was very complicated.
But what they came up with was an entirely different approach to how we deal with so-called crime. And it's more like what was done by Native Americans when they had people which broke lawswho broke laws. And they were tried, so to speak, by their peersby their mothers and fathers and doctors and chiefs, etc.who embarrassed them in front of the community and made them feel bad about what they had done and what they could do to overcome their crime. So it was doneit was called "the commons." It was done by the community, in the community, for the community. And that's why she says, get rid of prisons; just have local tribunals, where the people who know this person, man or woman, can put them on the right track.
It's revolutionary, but makes a lot of sense, because our prison system locks up millions of people who have never committed a crime in their life, the prime one being Mumia Abu-Jamal, who never killed anybody. And the woman who is grieving her departed husband, she grieved for the person who really killed the guy, and not for Mumia, who had nothing to do with that murder, and who has, incidentally, become one of the leading intellectuals in the United States. And I am now working on his seventh book. And all of his books have been in print for 30 years, and every one of them remains in print and continues to sell.
AMY GOODMAN: In January, we interviewed Kshama Sawant, one of the few Socialists to hold elected office in the country. She is an economics teacher and former Occupy Wall Street activist who was elected to Seattle's City Council after she ran on a campaign to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. We asked Sawant why she decided to run as a Socialist.

KSHAMA SAWANT: The important thing about running as a Socialist is, you know, for one, to show that there is a definite openness for clear alternatives, not only to the big business parties, but the system that they represent, the capitalist system. And if you look at recent polls, they show that people, especially young people, are much more open to socialism than you would find out from the corporate media. People are also fed up with the political dysfunction.

AMY GOODMAN: That is the new Socialist Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant. Michael Smith? And also, as we wrap up, because we have less than a minute right now, when people say, "You choose democracy, or you choose capitalism," the contradiction in that?
MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: Capitalism is incompatible with democracy. Fascism is compatible with capitalism, but notdemocracy and capitalism don't go. And we can see that trend. We did a bookMichael Ratner wrote the introductionon Bill Kunstler's writings, one of the founders of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and we called it The Emerging Police State. And people said, "Well, it's a little over the top, you know?" But it's exactly what's happening. And as Juan points out in his chapter, we either develop some socialist leadership and build a left-wing alternative here, or we're going to have fascism. That's the direction things are going in. So, Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA will help people get from where we are to where we want to be.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you both for being with us. Frances Goldin, literary agent, she was the literary agent for Adrienne Rich, she was for Barbara Kingsolver, Mumia Abu-Jamal, housing activist for over 60 years, and she will be turning 90I understand that we were making you a little older than you werein June. And so we wish you a happy pre-birthday. Michael Smith, thanks so much for being with us, as well, co-editors of Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA. That does it for the broadcast. Yes?